Python DAGs

May 5, 2014

Tales flags some interesting developments in the Python world. The demand for Python developers in finance does seem to be building. Both Man and Getco are big users, and as Tales points out, JP Morgan and BAML both use Python as the primary programming languages in their Athena and Quartz systems, both of which are inspired by Goldman’s SecDB/Slang. Tales wonders if Washington Square Tech will the fourth implementation of this paradigm; I believe it may be the fifth, as Morgan Stanley had an Athena like project called Pioneer during Jay Dweck’s ill fated tenure. Apparently that project is now defunct. The Athena paradigm is technically a very powerful solution for trading businesses that have run on ad hoc solutions using Excel for pricing and risk. Partly because they seek to replace Excel based pricing and risk, and partly because it’s compute efficient, all implementations of the Athena SecDB/Slang paradigm implement Directed Acyclic Graphs. I’m guessing that Washington Square Tech will think this could be very appealing for buy side firms that don’t have big in house tech stacks, together with incumbent tech teams defending them against replacements.

Thanks! I wasn’t aware of Cellulose. Funny name, since a key design trade off for DAGs is promoting compute efficiency at the cost of the memory use needed for caching intermediate results. Buggy caching can lead to memory leaks…